Only Imagine? Not Necessarily

Abstract

In her recent book, Only Imagine, Kathleen Stock promotes extreme intentionalism with respect to fictional content. She writes, ‘the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine’ (Stock, 1). There are at least three separate points here: (i) the author’s intentions determine the fictional content; (ii) the fictional content is (or should be) identical with the content of what the reader imagines; (iii) reading fiction necessarily entails imagining. The first two points are normative; they are concerned with truth in fiction. The third point takes for granted that fiction necessarily involves imagining on the part of the reader; the main debates here focus on the kind of imagining that is involved in reading fiction. In the following discussion, I leave aside the normative issues marked by the first two points and concentrate on the third point—namely, the relation between fiction and imagining.